


good things take time

by flowermasters



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Bonding, Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, Domestic, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Snapshots, also, discussions about time as a concept?, like ... this is heavily becho/bellamy centric, shall we make that a tag?, time jump fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 21:48:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14506137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: Bellamy, Echo, and six years.





	good things take time

**Author's Note:**

> Any part of this could be jossed by a flashback, but it's not exactly plotty, so I'm not too worried about it. 
> 
> Echo's "it took you three years" settled in my brain, because goddamn three years is a long time in space. Also, I'm really obsessed with their "talking about deep shit and cheering each other up" vibe.
> 
> Warnings for: hella Bellamy/Echo centric, mild sexual content, more Becho card games! Also, some brief, mild discussion of Murphy's mental health, if that bothers you, but I have a LOT of feelings about it.

0.

For a minute or two, Bellamy wonders if breathing will ever be easy again.

Only for a minute or two. But it does hurt, dragging oxygen in and pushing it back out, a stitch throbbing in his side. His body feels more strained and worn out after fighting to breathe for barely a minute—if that—than it had after being awake for days, constantly on the go, and slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Praimfaiya feels worse in the aftermath.

“Is everyone okay?” Bellamy asks, once he thinks he can speak steadily. He can’t.

“Peachy,” Murphy says.

Bellamy can see them from where he’s lying, but he doesn’t have the energy to move yet. Murphy and Emori are both upright now. Raven isn’t, but Bellamy can hear her murmuring faintly to Emori, her face still right next to a vent. Closer to him, Monty is stroking Harper’s hair with his bandaged fingers. Both of their eyes are open, and that’s all Bellamy needs to know right now.

Echo, of course, is conscious, still sitting close enough to him that their shoulders brush. She was the first thing he was able to see when he came to—her face came into focus as he took in those first few breaths. He would’ve continued to suffocate inside his helmet if she hadn’t taken it off.

There’s no time to process this, so he focuses on the immediate. Echo’s breath, unlike everyone else’s, is shallow and quick. Her eyes are closed. She’s a Grounder, in space, and she probably has no idea what the hell is going on.

“Hey,” he grits out, keeping his voice low, so that she knows this is directed at her. The others will still be able to hear, but nobody’s moving yet, which probably means everyone else is as bone tired as he is. “Hey. Look at me.”

Echo opens her eyes after a few seconds and fixes him with a stare. He’d expected some animosity, resentment over being ordered to do something, but instead there’s—misery. Her jaw is clenched, lips pressed tightly together as she struggles to breathe through her nose, but she’s got that same look in her eyes as she did on the ground—fear.

“You have to keep it together,” Bellamy says. It’s blunt, but it’s the best he can do right now. Some thanks for saving his life. “Okay? I need you to keep it together.”

It takes a few seconds, but Bellamy watches her expression harden. It’s like watching someone shut a door and hearing the lock click. “I am together,” she says, her voice remarkably steady for someone who still can’t breathe right.

He should say something, although he doesn’t know what or why. Echo has a chance to stay alive now, something she wouldn’t have on the ground—especially since she would have cut herself open before letting the death wave take her. He doesn’t have to comfort her.

Besides, they do have to get up. Murphy—to Bellamy’s surprise—is already up and gently tugging Emori to her feet. The two of them, together, bend down to help Raven stand. She’s pale but alive, her skin shiny with sweat. She grins at him, but it’s weak, and gone before he has a chance to smile back.

Bellamy avoids looking over at Monty and Harper, who—by the sound of it—are kissing, and maybe crying. As soon as his brain stops feeling like it’s been wrung out, he’ll probably feel like crying, too.

Thinking about Octavia makes the stich in his side hurt even worse. Thinking about Clarke feels like rubbing salt in the gaping wound that’s not really there.

Bellamy forces himself to sit upright, then heaves himself to his feet. Echo watches him rise, then clambers to her feet with none of her usual grace.

She meets his gaze once she’s steady on her feet. “So,” she says. “What now?”

“We need to make sure life-support systems are online Ark-wide,” Raven says, when Bellamy looks to her. “Oxygen, light, heat. That kind of thing. Monty, either get a room or come with me. The rest of you should probably start unloading the rocket. We have to make sure this place is actually livable for the foreseeable future, or else we just came a long way for nothing.”

Bellamy inhales deeply, then exhales. It hurts less now, his body already bracing for a new task. Echo is still standing in front of him, still watching him. Her expression is as unreadable now as it’s ever been.

“You heard her,” Bellamy says after a few seconds, as lightly as he can. “What are you waiting for, a tour? Welcome to the Ark.”

She doesn’t say anything as he turns and walks toward the docked ship, but he hears her heave a sigh before she follows behind.

-

1.

Everyone else has gone to bed. They all stayed up ‘til zero hour together, waiting at the table from dinnertime to midnight, first playing cards, then talking, then just sitting in silence, together. Bellamy doesn’t know what they’d expected to happen at midnight—maybe they thought he’d give a speech. He hadn’t. He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to.

Only Bellamy is still up, over an hour after midnight, still looking at Earth. Large portions of the planet are still hidden by orange-red dust, rendering most of the geography unrecognizable. The rare clear spots, places where the surface is visible through the atmosphere, are sometimes green or blue, but almost always a dead green, a dirty blue. With the exception, of course, of Eden, which isn’t visible right now.

“Are you alright?”

“ _Shit_ ,” Bellamy says, spinning to face the source of the noise. It’s only Echo, standing about ten feet behind him, backlit by the soft, yellowy glow of an emergency light panel. _Only_ Echo, sneaking up on him.

“Sorry,” Echo says lightly. “I thought maybe you heard me coming. My mistake.” She walks toward him on silent feet, though she’s wearing her boots. She seems to be wearing pajamas, though—leggings and a loose shirt with a ragged hem. Her hair is loose, spilling down over her shoulders. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Echo in what she wears to sleep.

“Yeah, right,” Bellamy says, watching as she moves to stand next to him at the viewport.

She keeps her gaze fixed on the planet below, but she smiles, very briefly. “You haven’t answered.”

“Of course I’m alright,” Bellamy says. He pauses, and then, curious: “Are you?”

“Yes,” she says. She’s still staring out at Earth; there’s a kind of frozen quality to her expression, almost like she’s in a trance, or like she can’t look away. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you came to stargaze?” Bellamy asks. He means for it to be a joke, but somehow it comes out serious, almost earnest. Maybe somebody else feels the same compulsion he does tonight, to stare down at the planet they left behind and look for any change, any improvement at all over yesterday. Everyone else just went to bed, their faces tired and bodies slow after a long day. Even Raven had only touched his arm lightly as she made her way back to her room. Either nobody else could stand to look or nobody else needed to—either he was stronger than them, or weaker.

“No,” Echo says. “I never heard your door open, so I thought you might be up, still. Doing something. I thought I could help.”

Their rooms are right next to one another. She can hear him come and go, and vice versa. Still, it’s strange, realizing that she might, occasionally, be listening. That she might care where he is. Her reasons for caring, of course, are her own. He sets the thought aside; there’s already too much to think about, all of it more important than Echo’s thoughts on him.

“Well,” Bellamy says. “I don’t have anything for you. There’s nothing to do.”

“An understatement,” Echo says. Bellamy smiles despite himself.

He doesn’t have anything else to say, and she seems not to, either. But she stays, for whatever reason. When Bellamy leaves half an hour later, mumbling good night and stifling a yawn, she stays in his place.

-

2.

“Seven,” Echo says.

Bellamy hands over the card without complaint, and Echo puts her completed pair in the pile. Bellamy glances at the digital clock hanging from the ceiling again. Ten minutes to midnight.

“A watched pot never boils,” Echo says, without looking up from her cards.

“What?” Bellamy says, bemused.

“You’ve never heard that?” Now she does look up, her eyebrows raised. “It means it will go faster if you stop waiting.”

“Quaint,” Bellamy says.

Echo rolls her eyes and looks back at her cards. Bellamy says, “Got any twos?”

“Go fish.”

He takes another card from the stack. A three. Echo surprises him, then, by saying, “Do you feel better this time than the last?”

“I don’t—” Bellamy begins, before he stops himself. He does know what she means, or at least he thinks he does. She still has a cryptic way of speaking sometimes, though, characteristic of a lot of the Grounders he’s met. “Yeah. It gets easier with time, I guess.”

“Your people care a lot about marking the years,” she says. “Maybe that makes it easier. Four.”

“Go fish,” Bellamy says. He seems to be the only one that really cares tonight, although he knows they’re all aware. But that’s not quite true. He knows they care, in their own ways. They just can’t handle anything as dismal as last year. The first year up here brought back fresh pain; this pain is a dull, deep ache. “Maybe. I guess it doesn’t matter as much to you.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Echo says, drawing a card. Maybe it’s a four, because she lays down a pair. “It’s been seven hundred and twenty-nine days. False days, that is.”

Bellamy huffs, amused. “False days?”

Echo looks up at him, the corners of her mouth lifting slightly. “Without the sun. On the ground, we measure time by the sun.”

“Right,” Bellamy says. Up here, the sun doesn’t dictate their movements at all; the light panels do, their dimming and brightening controlled by a computer to trick human biorhythms. He grew up without knowing natural sunlight, and yet there’s a slight tightness in his chest, like panic or sadness or both. “Three?”

Echo hands over a card, then turns her head so she can see the clock. “Almost time.”

Silence falls. It’s kind of silly, holding their breath for something that is actually completely arbitrary, if you think about it, but they do. Around twenty seconds pass and then the time changes. A new day—a new year in their fucked-up calendar. Once they had Unity Day; centuries ago there was New Years, Christmas, a whole host of celebrations, to break up the monotony of the days. Now they have this.

“Happy day seven hundred and thirty,” Bellamy says.

-

3.

He doesn’t know how loud it’s safe to be; the room to the left is empty, of course, but the room to the right is Raven’s. Surely she’d bang on the wall, if not outright start yelling at them. He’d rather walk out of an airlock than keep Raven awake, especially because she’d torment him about this, but still he just can’t _shut up_.

“Fucking—shit,” he says, uselessly. Echo, above him, her long hair tickling his face and neck, makes a little humming noise. Agreement, pleasure, or amusement, he can’t tell.

They kiss for a while, and that makes things a little quieter, but his bed creaks. It always has, every time he shifted his weight a certain way, but he had never really expected it to be a problem. It squeaks even louder when Echo straightens up and tilts her head back, her noises restrained in a way that Bellamy’s aren’t, but still audible. Neither of them stop.

It’s been so long since Bellamy felt anything as uncomplicated as this. Not that this isn’t complicated—he can feel doubt creeping around the edges of his thoughts, trying to ease its way in, but right now he’s got tunnel vision. He’s had it ever since he kissed her earlier today, a quick, too-sudden thing after she pulled him up from where she’d knocked him on his ass.

They’ve kissed a few times—only for a few minutes at the longest, and then they were interrupted by the sound of Monty and Harper, walking towards them down the hallway, talking unconcernedly. That was three days ago, and he doesn’t know why he started it, or why he can’t seem to stop, whenever they’re alone. But today, after he kissed her—she’d used her grip on his arm to spin him around, knock him to his knees, and get her arm around his throat. “Later,” she’d said, her voice strained as he tried to sling her off and only succeeded in choking himself. “We’re not finished here yet.”

Midnight comes and goes unnoticed, and Bellamy only realizes after they’ve been still for a few moments, breathing into the sudden quiet. Echo slides off of him wordlessly. As she sits up next to him, Bellamy’s eyes catch sight of the clock on the nightstand next to the bed. 00:11.

Echo shifts, legs over the side of the bed, feet on the floor. “Wait,” Bellamy says, sitting up on his elbows, his voice again coming out slightly too loud. She stills. He takes a breath. “You don’t have to. If you don’t want to.”

Echo looks over her shoulder at him, her face lit only by the emergency light next to the bed. Otherwise, the room is in complete darkness. “Do you want me to?”

 _To stay?_ he almost asks, but doesn’t. He opens his mouth, then closes it. He doesn’t answer. She moves closer again anyways.

There’s only one pillow, of course; she hadn’t brought her own. They try sharing it for a few minutes, shoulders jammed together, until Echo sighs and moves her head to rest on his shoulder. She turns her face away, and he realizes she’s looking at the clock when she says, “Oh.” 00:17.

“Yeah,” he says. “I always knew this would be the worst.”

She tenses slightly. “What do you mean?”

He doesn’t want to talk. He can’t just not, though. She’ll get up and leave, and then there will be no one to talk to, even if he wanted to. “The middle years. We’ve been here for three years, but we’re still so far from the end. It would make sense if we all went out of our minds now.”

The real halfway point was six months ago. It feels like yesterday and last week and ten years ago, somehow.

Echo turns her head to look at him again. Their faces are close enough that her breath tickles him. “Don’t think about it,” she says. Then, softer: “I can’t think about it right now.”

“I can’t _not_ think about it.”

It’s different for him, he knows. His sister is down there. Echo has nobody, nothing except the planet itself.

“Try,” she says. She kisses him, then, the angle awkward and almost uncomfortable for them both. She lets him roll over, onto her, and try to forget.

00:21.

-

4.

“Day 1461,” Echo says, taking her hand away from his hair.

“1461,” Bellamy says, before his brain becomes functional enough to process what she’s saying. He lifts his head from the pillow, squinting at her in the fake dawn light. “Oh.”

They sleep in his room, but he knows where Echo marks the tallies, on the wall next to her bed. The tallies are only about an inch long, set in orderly rows, but there’s so many of them now that it’s a bit overwhelming to look at. He’s glad he doesn’t have to look at it every day.

The lights aren’t at full brightness yet, which means it’s not quite time to get up. Bellamy rolls over onto his back. Echo is sitting up, a book resting in her lap. It’s the same decrepit anthology of poems they’ve kept on a communal shelf for years. _Great American Poems_ , a rather uninspiring title to bring with you into space, even if you expected to go back to Earth like the book’s first owner probably did. Every so often, one of them will pick it up when there’s nothing else to do, try to wring some new entertainment out of it.

“I didn’t know if you wanted me to wake you up,” Echo says, still looking down at the book, although she can’t be too engrossed if she’s talking to him. “Last night, I mean.”

“No,” Bellamy says. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have wanted her to wake him. It’s the first time he’s missed the transition, and it feels strange, but not bad. He’s been a bit melodramatic, really, waiting for midnight every year like it matters if he remembers what day it is. Hopefully, this time next year they’ll be too busy making the final preparations to go to the ground to even care.

“Did you sleep alright?” he asks her, because if she thought about waking him then that means she was awake.

“Well enough,” she says, turning the page. “But I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep.”

“This didn’t put you back to sleep?” Bellamy asks, reaching out to brush the edge of the book with his fingers. Echo smiles slightly, and allows it when Bellamy sits up, then eases behind her so that he can rest his shoulder on her chin. Ostensibly it’s done so he can read a long poem over her shoulder—Whitman, he’s pretty sure—but really, it’s more about touching her. He feels it, how she gets a little stiff, then relaxes back against him. It’s taken a while for there to be any touching outside of sex between them, and Echo is less used to that kind of touching, generally speaking, than Bellamy is.

“Slow reader, huh,” Bellamy says when she hasn’t turned another page in a few minutes.

“You’re distracting.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes. “I’m literally not doing anything.”

“Maybe you should be,” Echo says mildly, shifting back against him though there’s no space between them.

-

5.

The door unlocks with a click, and then somebody tugs it open and shuts it just as quickly. Bellamy doesn’t turn and he doesn’t look up; he doesn’t need to. Only one person on the Ark has footsteps that light.

“Bellamy,” Echo says, after a beat of silence.

“What?” he asks, swiping a finger across the screen of the tablet in his hands. There’s nothing exciting happening near Eden today, or at least, nothing exciting in the weather patterns the Ark’s systems are monitoring. From there, it should be a cloudless, sunny day.

“Don’t ‘what’ me,” she says. “I’m not the one you’re mad at, remember?”

 _I could be, if you want_ , Bellamy starts to say, but contains it. There’s no point in acting like a child, and Echo wouldn’t tolerate it even if he did. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“That was painless,” Echo says dryly, as she rounds the table and sits down in the chair opposite him. “Now you need to apologize to Raven.”

Bellamy sits the tablet down on the tabletop with a sigh, then looks up at her. She doesn’t say anything about his eyes, which are no doubt still pinkened, but he’s practiced enough at reading her expression now to see the way her brows pull together slightly in concern.

“I know,” he says. “If you’ve got a lecture prepared, you can save it.”

Now she raises her eyebrows. “A lecture? I thought that was your job.”

Bellamy snorts. “Fuck off,” he says, but there’s enough fondness in it that she doesn’t bother to bristle. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow. I know I was an asshole.”

“You probably were,” Echo says. “Murphy told me what happened.”

“Of course he did.” He and Emori were hanging out in Raven’s workroom and didn’t clear out when the yelling started. He’d almost forgotten they were there—but even if they hadn’t been, it’s impossible to hide anything when you see the same six people every single day.

“He’s unhappy, too,” Echo says, her voice firm. There’s not enough places in the room for Bellamy to look while he avoids meeting her eyes. “We all are. Raven most of all. I know you see that.”

Of course he does. It’s written all over her face, day in and day out. It’s the reason she’s so short with everybody sometimes. The reason she stays cooped up night and day, scribbling on dry-erase boards and tablets, unwilling to be disturbed even for meals. “Please don’t make me feel worse than I already do.”

“Bellamy,” Echo says, quietly. She leans forward and reaches across the table, her fingers brushing his hand. He turns his hand over, palm up, and lets her interlock their fingers.

“It’s been five years,” Bellamy says, meeting her eyes. “My sister—my sister will be waiting for us. That’s all I could think about, when I was talking to Raven. That I’ll never see Octavia again.”

_I’ve been working my ass off for years, Bellamy. Keeping this bucket of bolts running so we can stay alive._

_And for what? We’re going to die up here anyway. Just be straight with me for once. We’re never going to get to the ground and you know it._

Echo holds his gaze. “Octavia’s smart enough to know that there are no guarantees,” she says. “You told me yourself that there’s nothing that makes the ground safer today, or in six months, than it was yesterday. As much as we know, there’s a lot that we won’t know until we get there. And if we can’t get there now, or in six months, that’s alright, because the earth—and Octavia—will be waiting for us when we do. Don’t let your concern for Octavia make you push your friends away.”

His friends. His kru. Bellamy lets this thought sit for a moment, though there’s not much to dwell on. Echo’s right. He knows she’s right. “I thought you didn’t have a lecture planned.”

Echo squeezes his hand. “ _Shof op_. Talk to Raven.”

“I will,” Bellamy says. And he will, tonight. He’ll talk to all of them, too, about what to do from here. But it’s a long time before he can bring himself to let go of Echo’s hand.

-

6.

Every morning is quiet on the Ark, but this one is quieter than usual.

Raven doesn’t show up for breakfast; Emori mutters something about a long night, looking dour as Monty pours her a helping of green slop. With two gone from their number, nobody seems to know how to break the silence once it falls.

Echo finds him in the training room, in the midst of his stretches. “Murphy just punched me in the ear,” she says calmly.

Bellamy looks up, frowning. Echo can handle herself, sure, but it still grates on his nerves when Murphy acts like a wild animal to the others. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Echo says, sitting down and beginning to unlace her boots. “I think I woke him up. He was sitting against the wall with his back to me, and didn’t answer when I spoke to him, so I gave him a push. I probably would’ve punched him, too, had our roles been reversed.”

Bellamy scoffs. “Yeah, but you would’ve knocked him out cold,” he says. “You know, assault was a death penalty offense on the Ark, before. We could threaten Murphy with the airlock.”

Echo sighs. “You wouldn’t.”

“No,” Bellamy says. “I wouldn’t.”

This isn’t the old days, and besides, Murphy’s done worse in the past few months. He’d been circling the drain for a long time, well before the yelling match that made for the last time either he or Emori had slept in their room. Any one of them could be him—lose their shit, start lashing out at the others because the realization that they really might be stuck here for the rest of their lives is finally, despite a lot of resistance, starting to sink in.

Echo begins her own stretches, rolling her shoulders and closing her eyes. “I wish I hadn’t stopped counting. The days, I mean.”

“Would doing the math help?” Bellamy asks dryly. There’s a moratorium on talking about how long it’s been—or how long it will be—but he and Echo don’t observe it in private. There has to be at least one person here who they can be blunt with, even when it hurts. Bellamy’s beginning to think that not talking about it with the whole group is doing more harm than good, anyways. They can’t live in a fantasy forever, even if denial feels better than anything else.

“Probably not,” Echo says, her tone calm. “But it might pass some time.”

Bellamy huffs. “Yeah, we still got plenty of that.”

Once Echo finishes stretching, she allows him to tug her to her feet so they can begin. He hangs onto her for a second longer than necessary. “Let me see,” he says, and she rolls her eyes but turns her head to the side anyway, revealing a slightly pink ear. He kisses it, and she grimaces, but she’s hiding a smile.

“Better?”

“You’re ridiculous.” But she doesn’t protest when he kisses her cheek, or her mouth, and she leans into him as he leans into her.


End file.
